Appeal filed in case of Nazi war-criminal suspect

BERLIN 
A German prosecutor said Monday he has appealed a court ruling that a Nazi war-criminal suspect is too ill to stand trial.

Dortmund Prosecutor Ulrich Maass said he asked a state court in Cologne to review the medical dismissal of attempts to try 87-year-old Heinrich Boere for the wartime killings of three Dutch civilians in the Netherlands.

Maass said he will argue that despite Boere's old age and poor health, he should be made to answer for his crimes. "We have to try. This is the last chance that I have," Maass said.

He brought murder charges against Boere in April for the World War II killings of three men in the Netherlands when he was a member of a Waffen SS death squad that targeted civilians in reprisal killings for resistance attacks.

Boere fled to Germany after the war and was sentenced to death in absentia by a Dutch court in 1949. The sentence was later commuted to life imprisonment, but German courts have blocked attempts to extradite him or enforce the verdict here.

Recently, Boere was No. 6 on the Wiesenthal Center's list of most-wanted suspected Nazi war criminals.

Maass reopened the case with his own investigation in 2006.

In January, an Aachen state court said Boere was too ill to stand trial, citing a thorough two-day medical exam.

The son of a Dutch man and German woman, Boere was 18 when he joined the Waffen SS – the fanatical military organization faithful to Adolf Hitler's ideology – at the end of 1940, only months after the Netherlands had fallen to the Nazi blitzkrieg.

After taking part in the Nazi invasion of the Soviet Union, he returned to the Netherlands and joined a group of mostly Dutch volunteers given the job of killing their countrymen in reprisal attacks.

The unit is suspected of 54 killings, and Boere admitted after the war while in an Allied prison camp that he had taken part in three slayings, according to Dutch court documents.

Teun de Groot is the son of one of those Dutch victims.

De Groot said he realizes it is unlikely Boere would spend time in jail, even if the Cologne court were to order the suspect's trial and he was convicted. But de Groot said it is important to pursue the case while Boere is still alive.